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19 April 2008

If you need another reason to stop using bottled water, this weeks' finding that Bisphenol A (an ingredient in polycarbonate plastics) is of "some concern" regarding its harm to human health is one more to add to the pile. So not only is bottled water a scam to sell over priced, filtered tap water to a gullible public; a way to use up even more increasingly expensive and scarce petroleum on packaging; and a way to generate even more solid waste. Bottled water will make your daughters hit puberty at age nine and cause who knows what else in everybody.

A controversial, estrogen-like chemical in plastic could be harming the development of children's brains and reproductive organs, a federal health agency concluded in a report released Tuesday.

The National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, concluded that there was "some concern" that fetuses, babies and children were in danger because bisphenol A, or BPA, harmed animals at low levels found in nearly all human bodies.

Read the article, and others like it and pretty soon you'll see that this research is the first official finding that wasn't bought and paid for by the plastics industry. This is not news, I've been reading about pseudo estrogens in plastics for at least the last ten years. I had no idea of their omnipresence until this week though. "BPA is found in nearly all human bodies," the report said. Think about that. In yet another example of industries' complete inability to police themselves, chemicals like BPA are swimming around unseen and unknown in all of us and it's only now that someone raises a red flag. What other harmful substances am I harboring and don't know about? Wait a minute, I don't want to know.

This is not solely a concern of the granola-eaters and fringe elements of the environmental movement. This is another glowing example of the unsustainability of life as we've come to know it in the last 50 years. The move to plastic packaging happened because it was supposedly cheaper, and cheaper was supposed to mean better. As with just about anything, looking for cheaper is a short term goal that always carries with it a host of unintended consequences. All I can say is please give me back my glass bottles.